


Family Grammar

by RageSeptember



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Fire Nation Royal Family, Gen, love is a strange affair, tangled relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-23 03:26:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11981130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RageSeptember/pseuds/RageSeptember
Summary: It really began in the days when the love laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. - Arundhati Roy





	Family Grammar

**Author's Note:**

> Contains a few references to the comics, and I'm not sure how much sense this makes without having at least a vague idea of what happens in them. Maybe it still works - give it a shot, and let me know. ;)

Azula is better than Zuko.

In every way that matter, she is better; quicker; years ahead of her older sibling. Born lucky, her father says, but what he really means is _born strong_. She can feel his quiet approval as she masters form after form, effortlessly taming lightning while her brother is still struggling with the basics. She reads at three, recites the names of every the Fire Lord and their many deeds at four. Geography, algebra, strategy and tactics, she picks it up as other children pick up pebbles on the beach, because Azula isn't just strong, she is clever too.

Clever enough to know that her father loves not her, but her strenght, and that her mother fears it.

Clever enough to know that she is the perfect Fire Nation princess, beauty and brains and brawn all wrapped up into one, and that it isn't enough.

\---

Azula's mother scolds her for tormenting animals and would never raise her hand against either of her children, or anyone. Azula's mother murders a man (a hateful man; it is murder still) to save Zuko's life. Then she flees in the dead of the night and leaves Azula with the bitter knowledge of what lenghts a mother will go to to save a beloved child, and with no one to save her.

Is it so strange then that it should feel like justice when Ozai puts his mark of fire on Zuko's face and sends him away in disgrace? (It doesn't matter that Uncle Iroh goes with him, that he too chooses Zuko, becaues they're the same those two, weak, and she doesn't need either of them. She is born lucky and strong and clever and in time they will all see that these are the only things that matters.)

\---

Three years later Azula is stronger than ever and Zuko chooses the Avatar and Mai chooses Zuko and Ty Lee chooses Mai. Ozai chooses himself.

\---

Once he has accepted the reality of Ozai's evil, Zuko's need to find his mother becomes all the more urgent. Still too young and too long in the shadow of his heritage to refuse its importance, he's desperate to find something good there; a glimmer of light, something to cling to and be guided by.

What he finds is a woman who wears a different name and a different face and doesn't remember being his mother. Somehow her willful forgetting hurts more than her leaving.

In the end Ursa is not a goddess, not even a holy priestess; just human. But though still young, Zuko is no longer a boy, and so he can forgive her for that – and himself, eventually, for ever expecting otherwise.

Azula is just human too, but that takes longer to accept.

\---

Zuko holds Izumi and wonders at the ambition and hatred and fear that would have a man scar his own child, wonders at the terrible love that would have a quiet and gentle woman committ murder.

How much love is enough love? How much is too much?

\---

Ozai...

Maybe he did love his children, once. Maybe he did hesitate just for a moment before agreeing to kill his son, before burning him. Maybe he thought by doing so he would eradicate all that was soft and weak and gentle within himself, pin it all on Zuko, and make himself perfect, and strong, and fearless.

Maybe, at times, far away from everything on Ember Island, he and Ursa found joy in their children and at least contentment with each other. Maye for a while, there was happiness, and a different future still possible.

Ursa was not the only one forced by Azulon into a loveless marriage.

Maybe Ozai, too, could have been better. Maybe that only makes what he did all the worse.

\---

He is bright, is Zuko in the light. ”A new era of peace and love,” he promises, and they all believe him because he glows like dawn, and the shadows have been banished to the dark where they belong; Azula to her ward, and Ozai to his prison.

The long night has ended; morning is come. ”We'll rebuild it together.”

Of course it's Azula who is the first to realize that heritage is not so easy to renounce. All the speeches and good intentions in the world is not enough to leave behind the burdens you never knew you picked up.

Sneering above Zuko in the crypt of the first Fire Lord's most trusted adviser, her voice is trimuphant: ”My destiny you see, is to make you into the Fire Lord I tried to be – one who is strong, who rules through fear. Can't you see it's already working?”

And Zuko does see. In the years to come, as he takes step after step away from his father's tainted legacy, unlearning, he begins to feel thankful to his sister for accidentally holding up a mirror to his face before he had time to become enarmoured of his father's likeness in it.

He eventually remembers that Azula doesn't do anything by accident, and that's when he sets out to find her.

\---

How do you measure love? To whom do you owe it?

\---

Children in the courtyard, and laughter. The war is not yet ten years away. ”I was thinking of staffing the eastern towers once more,” Zuko says. ”The tiger seals are getting brazen.”

Azula's smile is not quite bitter. ”You need someone to oversee it.”

Not perfect, not right, but the world's been broken and broken again, and they all live with the scars. Zuko is about to say something, explain, but Izumi runs shrieking up the garden path and grabs Azula's leg, hiding behind it, delight in her squeals, no fear. Azula sighs: ”All right.”


End file.
